Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday August 24, 2010 @08:43AM
from the i-remember-when dept.

An anonymous reader writes "15 years ago on this day, Microsoft's then new Windows 95 was released. Among other things it moved users away from the archaic file manager and program manager to Windows explorer and the start menu. Compared to today's 'social desktop,' I'd much rather have the simpler and more sparse (pre-Internet Explorer integrated) Windows Explorer, though I do not like the (lack of) stability that Windows 95 offers. Of course if you were alive then, you've probably seen the commercials." I fondly recall downloading build after build and installing them. But within months of the official release, I switched to Linux.

I had a buddy back in 94/95 who was constantly throwing OS/2 in my face. Hey, look at all the Windows I can have open, look at my clean interface, look at how much faster and more stable this runs that your Win 3.11, look at all these DOS sessions open simultaneously!

Windows 95 finally gave me the ability to rub his arrogant face right in my ass. And, for that, I say "Thank you, Bill Gates."

Many OS's were better and died or got very vew users. OS/2 and many others. It's necessary to study what makes an OS popular to gather some more share from Microsoft. I'd like to see a study of where all the MacOS users are coming from.

>>>OS/2 didn't get "very few users". It was a very mainstream operating system at its peak.

Ha. The Commodore Amiga OS in the early 90s sold more units than IBM OS/2 during the same period, and yet nobody here would call the AmigaOS "mainstream". Both were minority OSes.

As for ease of use, I copy this from a website as example: "Take the process required to install and configure a printer. Under Windows it was a simple two step process. Under OS/2 1.2 it required the user to perform unnatural act

Study what makes an OS popular? It's already been done. Those exclusive contracts that Bill Gates got from all the vendors did it. One doesn't even need to look at any other of Gates unfair trade practices. There came a point where any vendor HAD to be able to offer MS - and Gates insisted that if they sold MS, they could ONLY sell MS.

A few other little tricks reinforced those exclusive contracts - like donating a few million computers to high schools and colleges, so that students were indoctrinated into the Microsoft way of doing things. But, those contracts are the numero uno prime reason for MS "popularity".

I was a big fan of OS/2 hence why I'm reading this. I worked in Waldensoftware in the early 90s and I have to tell you, when Windows 3.1 upgrade came up individuals lined up around the store to get it. The popularity of Microsoft is not just monopolistic contracts (though those helped a lot), the popularity is that other vendors don't want to support huge chunks of the market.

Apple doesn't want the corporate marketIBM couldn't even get it together with OS/2 but they didn't want the home marketLinux doesn'

>>>It's necessary to study what makes an OS popular to gather some more share from Microsoft.

Easy. The same thing that killed off the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and the Apple Macintosh (almost). Offices. They picked the IBM PC as their preferred platform in the early 80s, and it just continued steadily from there. And consumers of course bought what they had in the office, because it was familiar to them.

TRS-80 was the #1 selling computer in the late 70s. Atari 400/800 held the mantle in 1982, followed by the mass-produced Commodore 64 (30 million units sold). But by 1987 IBM PC was the #1 machine and nobody else could touch it. The competition was driven into bankruptcy by the mid-90s (or in the case of Apple - almost bankrupted).

Once in protected mode, the virtual device drivers did their magic. Among other things those drivers did was "suck the brains out of MS-DOS," transfer all that state to the 32-bit file system manager, and then shut off MS-DOS.

Yes, it did use it as a bootloader. Question is: why didn't they write a propper bootloader in the first place then? Also, it damn well could use DOS drivers. The device manager complained about drivers in 16-bit mode, but it use them. It WAS a hybrid and not a full 32-bit OS.

What was wrong with DOS as the bootloader? The upside is that single user DOS mode could be used as a recovery console, even allowing you to run DOS based applications without loading the full Windows.

It did, however, have a considerable amount of 16-bit code under the hood (to be fair, OS/2 was still running a 16-bit version of HPFS until version 4). Windows 95 was one big fat kludge, rushed out because MS was terrified that OS/2 was actually positioned to grab pack a substantial portion of the Windows market. It was an unstable monster, with horrible TCP/IP support. When they shipped Office 95, it too was basically a suite of 16-bit apps in a 32-bit wrapper, again, rushed out to keep WordPerfect and

Yes, but OS/2 was still way better than Win95. Win95 was 32-bit "OS" bolted on DOS. OS/2 was 32-bit from the ground up. The Windows of today has more in common with OS/2 than it has with Windows 95.

Windows 95: n.32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition.

From wikipedia:"Official system requirements were an Intel 80386 DX CPU of any speed, 4 MB of system RAM, and 120 MB of hard drive space."

I have porn that wouldn't run on this computer (Blue rays take a lot of processing power). Which brings me to my next point, the code name of "Chicago" was prescient. Seriously, named for political blustering and needless posturing. The windy city by virtue of people at each other's throats because of their beliefs.

They'd dropped the codename because of all the "all blow and no go" jokes being made. It took Microsoft FOREVER to get the silly thing out and they rolled out a less stable product than the last RC they pushed out to the beta testers. And we won't go into the horrors they inflicted on the developer beta testers that got pre-betas... >;-D

Your buddy was right and you still are clueless.OS/2 was a much better OS than Windows 95. It had a better UI, it was a lot more stable, and was really a very modern OS.There are still some knowledgeable companies that are just now migrating the last of their systems off of OS/2

Windows 95 was cheap. That was it's only real benefit. I hate to say it but the terms arrogant and ass would seem to bet apply to you and not your friend.That and Microsoft got the hardware manufactures to install it. Had IBM gotten everybody on board with OS/2 it would have one. In this case it was all marketing and you bought it.

Oh, trust me we did work hard with OS/2 preloads to try to convince people that it was a good platform, but ultimately we lost out to a better, meaner, more willing to do the unethical and probably illegal, marketing machine.

I assume you were IBM back then. Then come on. OS/2 wasn't even available preloaded on your own computers. I bought an Ambra and I couldn't get OS/2 preloaded nor OS/2 support for the sound card on the Ambra motherboard. Your IBM resellers didn't carry or push OS/2. I had a bear of a time getting OS/2 1.3 until you had the direct order program. Also you wouldn't distribute in normal channels.

IBM was talking out of both sides of their mouth the whole time they were pushing OS/2. Sun and Microsoft both

If you followed the Microsoft anti-trust trial, you would know that at least part of the reason for this was the fact that Microsoft denied IBM a Windows 95 license until the very last minute because IBM wanted to load OS/2 on some of its boxes. At that point in time, Windows had a very strong presence in the market, and MS was able to apply a lot of pressure to PC makers... even IBM.

FWIW, OS/2 1.x was a Microsoft-branded product for most of its life, and was somewhat crippled with the dated desktop and D

You are right that OS/2 was way better than Win 95. However, IBM was always on board. It was Microsoft who sabotaged OS/2. You do know that Microsoft wrote the original versions of OS/2? But at the same time, they were working on Windows 3.0. When it was released and got popular, they basically bailed on OS/2. And left IBM to clean up the mess that Microsoft had created. IBM had mostly rewritten it by 1996 when OS/2 Warp 4 came out. But by then, it was too late.

Initially, the programs that each was able to run weren't that dissimilar. There wasn't that much real 32-bit software, so most used the Win32S extensions, and OS/2 did a fairly good job of keeping up with Microsoft's constant changing of that library for some time. I think OS/2 ended up stopping support with Win32S 1.25a or something... Win32S 1.30 started using very high virtual addresses that OS/2 couldn't handle.

OS/2 came with a copy (or could use an existing copy) of Windows as its WinOS2 subsystem,

OS/2 was still the better OS, by ALOT. Its closed nature doomed its future, and there was alot of mistrust in IBM in the marketplace at the time, but in terms of stability w/ a gui inteface, it was unmatched. The OS lived on long past its best-before date in alot of utility devices like information terminals @ airports and kiosks, ABMs, and other devices into the mid-2000s.

btw the guys from AIX land in Austin were in the habit of visiting the CPDOS developers in Boca in 1986, to tell them that they already had a 32-bit OS that ran on i386, that could run multiple DOS windows and all that, and asking why were we spending enough money to launch the Hubble telescope (AND go repair it, as it happened) to develop something that we already could do with a Unix variant.

Clearly, you never used Windows 3.1. "File manager" and "Program Manager" were the programs you would use to interact with your system in Windows 3.1 (actually, last I checked, Program Manager still existed in Windows XP, and probably still in Vista and Windows 7).

Xplorer2 is great, somehow I think it was a mistake of MS to not include a dual pane option, as it's a real pain in the ass at times to copy things around the file tree using explorer. But given either Xplorer2 or Teracopy and it works out a lot more effectively.

I remember getting caught up in the hype and putting it on a 486 DX2 66 with 4 MB. Damn but that was slower than molasses running uphill in January. Suffered with that computer for nearly 2 years before I saved up enough for a replacement (poor college student at the time).

Must be all about the memory, I had it running on a DX33 with 8Mb. It was fine but I remeber having a terrible time with a driver for the Avance Logic graphics card that it had fitted. Things like the clock (when you double clicked the time) as the hand swept round the screen wasn't redrawn.

I remember getting caught up in the hype and putting it on a 486 DX2 66 with 4 MB. Damn but that was slower than molasses running uphill in January. Suffered with that computer for nearly 2 years before I saved up enough for a replacement (poor college student at the time).

God, 4MB of RAM for Windows '95??? That must have been brutal.

In '92 or '93 my girlfriend bought a similar machine with 4MB of RAM, and that was only Windows 3.11. On the second day she had it we watched Word thrash the machine within a

Back then, I ripped the guts out of my 386 and put in a P133 with 32MB RAM, a 1GB HDD, and even a T1000 for backups. That, plus a 28.8 modem. That managed to run '95 about as well as could be expected.

Kids don't get taught about psychology, and industry and state doesn't talk about psychology, because psychology is the science that is abused to create PR, propaganda, and advertising. If the people knew about psychology (and even things like what a Freudian slip is, or who Freud was), then they would be much less effected by PR, propaganda, and advertising.

I think those crackpots Scientologists oppose psychology too because if people understood psychology, they would be able to spot the brainwashing.

I don't know who Roberto Sparese is [facebook.com], but I'm sure he'll get a few more hits to his Facebook account as other readers also wonder whether that was actually a little-known word and not just a typo.

I just copied data from a windows 95 machine at a ski resort that they use to keep an old editable version of the trail map on. They are finally getting around to getting data off it to see if there are updated versions of the software. Also worked recently on an old Dos 3.x machine with a power supply dated '87 that runs a voltage QA test machine for parts that are made for the F22 Raptor. A modern replacement for that test hardware is in the $15,000 range. While this isn't common, don't confuse it wit

get win98 or win98se and run ROM or ROM2se on it (ROM = Revenge of Mozilla) it is basically a tool that strips out IE & OE and the win98 windows explorer and replaces it with a hacked/patched win95 windows explorer, and it is much more stable than win95 & more stable than a stock win98/win98se (i have to say it makes the best win9x possible but the only caveat is any application that requires internet explorer will not function. but anything else works great.

after doing a quick google search i think this app is nowhere to be found, i bet i can dig up a copy on an old CD-r that i kept with lots of ancient third party applications for win9x

I was using Norton Desktop on my Windows 3.1 box before Windows 95 came out. Nice clean interface and I didn't have to have a bunch of windows open. When 95 came out, it removed the need for Norton as it incorporated many of the features into the Windows shell.

I do know that Windows 95 killed my desire to muck with the system. With Windows 3.1 I was researching performance techniques and improving my config. I had a friend with a faster system however my Windows install was faster than his (he ranted a bit about it:) ).

But Windows 3.1 killed my desire to program until I got into Unix. I spent a lot of time reading the Petzold books and I understood how to write code for Windows but it was more complicated than I wanted to deal with for the hobby stuff I was doing.

Of course if you were alive then, you've probably seen the commercials.

You don't honestly think that slashdot is in any way relevant to kids 15 and under, do you? If we even said "old enough to remember seeing the commercials" and graciously said that someone 5 years old at the time might remember them, that would mean you expect slashdot to have relevance to the 20-and-under set.

Although I honestly don't remember the commercials, and Windows 95 was the first OS I bought (or pirated? I don't remember now) on CD. I do recall that 95 was the first windows release that actually required you to enter a registration key at installation; 3.1 would graciously let you "enter it later".

I think Windows 95 is greatly under-appreciated. I remember one of the biggest jokes was "Oh, its more Mac Like!". People who made that claim seem to not remember the horrors that was MacOS 7, 8 or 9. I did not become familer with Linux until 1997, so I cannot compare, but, as far as I can remember, the only thing even in the same league with Windows '95 OS/2, which Microsoft wrote a good deal of the code for, if I remember right. It pretty much standardized Plug N Play on the PC platform (granted, it was b

A legacy bit of device programming kit I have only runs on Windows and needs a serial port, and I have an old Toshiba satellite laptop with not enough memory to boot XP.. Win95 works fine. I bought the world's oldest PCMCIA (non-32 bit) network adapter off a certain Internet Auction Site; I just drop Intel Hex files into a shared folder and off it goes. AND it doesn't insist on my downloading multiple updates for Windows security fixes every time I boot it. I did have to take the hard disk out, put a DOS b

We went from Windows For Workgroups to NT 3 in the IT dept where I was at and I never went back to consumer-grade MS OS. Three years ago I switched to Mac, and am quite happy. Sadly I keep an XP Pro VM around, will probably have to upgrade it to 7 so I can remote support my dad.

What it did contribute, though, was that it showed the Apple Menu to the whole world. Mac OS has now moved away from that, but pretty much everyone else is now using some sort of logo, in the upper or lower left corner of the screen, to access a menu of applications and/or OS settings. And I think Windows 95 (not MacOS) really gets the credit for that. If they hadn't used the idea, I really just can't help but wonder if anyone would be doing it anymore.

I was at Boeing back then. Everyone in engineering had Macs but the fix was in with Microsoft. W3.1 was judged unsuitable for use, so only a few poor suckers were stuck with that. We had a number of PCs running DOS. Great for lab use, as numerous ISA cards were avaiilable, or easily cobbled up by our technicians.

One day, the IT folks showed up and dropped a Dell 166 on my desk (between my Mac and X terminal). It only had a DOS command prompt, but the hardware guys assured me that the Windows guys would follow shortly with their install disks.

About 3 months later, this pig was still sitting there with nothing but a DOS command prompt staring back at me. The story was that initial W95 installs were proving to be a disaster and IT was in the process of staffing up to levels needed to support the platform. I went to my boss and told him, "While I'm waiting, there's this other system available now that I can load and try out. Its called Linux."

I started with Linux in 1995, too. It was Yggdrasil, took twenty minutes to boot on a 386/33 MHz machine. To make it boot faster one had to configure it to look only for the available hardware, otherwise it would look for everything it had drivers for and wait for timeout.

CPU and memory requirements were so much higher, that you basically needed a brand new machine to run it.

Because of the registry, it was no longer possible to copy a program to another machine by simply copying a particular directory structure and a few.ini files. For M$, of course, this was the entire point. Unfortunately...

Because the registry was so easily corruptible, people who used it would regularly see their machine's performance drop and/or encounter regular lock-ups and blue screens, and subsequently find themselves spending hours reinstalling everything. It was no longer possible to fix things by modifying a few.ini files with a text editor.

Because of the registry, which would quickly grow beyond the size of a 1.44 MB floppy disk, the only real backups possible were disk-image backups.

Because the registry could so easily be exploited, the number of species of computer viruses exploded. Without that, the virus industry would certainly not be as successful as it is today.

Because of the registry, it could become next to impossible to get certain complicated machines, particularly fancy laptops, to work properly after installing all of the necessary drivers.

It would not lend itself to the simple remote boot method that was previously so popular with Win311 (well, I do know of one NetWare shop that actually managed this feat anyway, but it was very complex). For many of us who thought we had things licked, this made network maintenance an order of magnitude more complicated.

At the time may career as a NetWare sysadmin was just taking off, so it was another six years before I made the switch to Linux, but for me Win95 marked the beginning of the end of my belief in proprietary software.

Windows 95's upbeat but non-hipster marketing [youtube.com] marked the start of a high point for Microsoft. They were essentially saying "here's something we think is good enough to do lots of things with, and we're going to help you do that" - and they were right. It wasn't anywhere near interesting technically, but it was accessible, cheap, familiar and MS encouraged it to become well-supported on a variety of hardware.

Well, seen in the context of Microsoft's other commercials and marketing campaigns, this is arguably the least terrible. Its almost actually kind of good. I didn't vividly remember how terribly Win95 was, I might actually be kind of inclined to want to buy it. Its much less lame than the Win7 commercials, and its 88 windows better!

Well, Apple's OS at the time wasn't exactly the pinnacle of stability (or anything else for that matter), so it would have made them look a bit silly. Even Mac OS 9, released in 1999, made Windows 95 look remarkably modern.

Sometime around 2000 or 2001, I inherited a Windows 98 machine with massive installed cruft. It ran slowly, and did a lot of weird things. Finally, one morning, it finally collapsed. After trying resuscitation to no avail, I grabbed the handiest Windows CD -- which happened to be the initial release of Windows 95. I installed it and was amazed at how quick and responsive the PC (a Pentium of some sort) had become. So I downloaded and installed about two dozen patches. Not only fast, but a lot more sta

A year? I don't recall mine going that long without needing a reinstall. I'm sure it was possible, I just didn't feel like putting in the work it took to make happen. Back during the days when DOS was the thing, it wasn't so bad, even with Win 3.1 bolted on top of it, but somehow Win 95 marked the more or less beginning of the end of any effort at keeping up the appearance that the customer is the person that purchases the copy.

Indeed. In 1997, I ran my Windows 95 box with a year of Uptime without needing to reboot it,

Sorry, I call bullshit. A known issue [microsoft.com], fixed only in 1999, would prevent Windows 95 and 98 from going over 49.7 days of uptime (2^32 milliseconds). Much hilarity ensued back in the day since "how could anyone have noticed / run into this":-)

Sorry, I call bullshit. A known issue [microsoft.com], fixed only in 1999, would prevent Windows 95 and 98 from going over 49.7 days of uptime (2^32 milliseconds). Much hilarity ensued back in the day since "how could anyone have noticed / run into this":-)

Thing is, I know of at least one other installation that was reputed to have stayed up for a long time - much like the GP asserts.

My guess is the machine(s) in question were somehow or other rebooting themselves in the middle of the night long before 49.7 days was up.

My work Win 95 machine, in the 300MHz days, was coaxed into running for about 30 days without a reboot. By then it was unusable though, I remember icons on the screen all being corrupted, you could barely start any applications due to lack of resources. I can't remember if I purposefully rebooted it in the end, or if it crashed.

9x did not do stability, but it did mean that when sat in front of a 9x machine you wouldn't get stuck at the office late. 2 minutes before home time, a quick double ctrl-alt-del and it would be a case of "fucking Windows has crashed again. Oh well, might as well go home, 'cause I can do anything without the computer working". You can't get away with that any more, every day. Maybe once a month. The PHBs have wised-up to the fact that most computers don't appear to be as shit as they used to be. Windows is of course as shit as it used to be, just in different ways.

Just remembered another 95 PC in the same office, connected up to a client's network for support, that went really strange one day, the clock started going too quickly. I think it was going about 4 times faster than it should, and seeing the clock spinning too fast was utterly hilarious. The machine seemed to be working fine otherwise though. A reboot cleared it, and I never saw Windows do that again... that was the kind of craziness you got with 9x!.

It's not so much teacup pissing as herding cats.. It's hard to build a top-down integrated solution without people on (the same) payroll. The only thing that saved it for the back end is the fact that everyone generally agreed to do things the *nix way.

Surely, you don't really think that's what it's all about, do you? Who cares if Windows has more market share? The purpose of free software projects is to produce quality free software, and as long as we continue to do that we could care less whether more people are using it than the proprietary alternative.

And today -- 15 years later -- it's still "almost ready" for the desktop.

In all fairness that is because the finish line keeps moving. Just because they're still behind does not imply that they haven't been close in the past. Personally, my first real experience was around 2000. At the time, the OS presented to consumers was Windows ME and Windows 2000 was overpriced and poorly supported by non-business applications. At the time I really thought Linux had a bright future, I'd say they were way past ME. Then in 2001 Windows XP came and was a lackluster for those of us used to win

Networking was the big leap forward from my perpective. I never had mouse responsiveness issues with Win 3, but when it came to plugging in to the ethernet or a modem, it was a train wreck of competing and incompatible networking layers. Depending on which application you needed to use, you might have to reboot into a completely different configuration.

If you wanted to create a dialup Internet-access service, you had to distribute a whole networking bundle to your prospective customers. What a mess!

It's weird, though. I moved out of the parents' place almost 15 years ago and despite only having been back for short stints since (a couple of university holidays when I couldn't find anything better and a period of about 2-3 months between finishing up my studies and finding a proper job - yeah, the market for new graduates was much kinder back then) I still call it "home" when I talk about it. This is despite having a mortgage on my own place and whatnot. I suspect if they ever moved house, I wo